In This Issue

Reporting

One Sunday last February, a young woman named Kristen Smith left the parking lot of Bethany Baptist Church, in Plant City, Florida, and drove along a two-lane country road with a large gold crown on the seat beside her. The mossy pasturelands around Plant City—the winter strawberry…

In August, 2000, Dr. Roger Wetherbee, an infectious-disease expert at New York University’s Tisch Hospital, received a disturbing call from the hospital’s microbiology laboratory. At the time, Wetherbee was in charge of handling outbreaks of dangerous microbes in the hospital…

In the Grizzly Manor Café, a man with a broken right hand sat alone eating eggs. He had tired eyes and graying hair and a nose that looked deflated. The town of Big Bear Lake is small—fewer than seven thousand people—and athletes stand out. It didn’t take long for a woman …

On May 3, 2005, in France, a man called an emergency hot line for missing and exploited children. He frantically explained that he was a tourist passing through Orthez, near the western Pyrenees, and that at the train station he had encountered a fifteen-year-old boy who was alone…

Shouts & Murmurs

A CBS/Pravda/Farmer’s Almanac/“Avatar: The Last Airbender” poll released today indicates that yesterday never happened for seventy-two per cent of all respondents, but, if it had, thirty-two per cent more Independents believe now than just last May that Barack Obama and John…

Fiction

On occasion, the two women went to lunch and she came home offended by some pettiness. And he would say, “Why do this to yourself?” He wanted to keep her from being hurt. He also wanted his wife and her friend to drift apart so that he never had to sit through another dinner …

The Critics

In a year saturated with political conversation, can there be any topic that has not yet been discussed? Well, here’s one: 2008 is the centenary of a curious and mesmerizing book that was long considered the most important study of politics and society ever produced by an American…

Ostensibly devoted to the problem of literary translation, this provocative treatise rambles through the Western canon from Cervantes to Bellow, treating novelists less as subjects than as characters in a sprawling intercontinental epic. Thirlwell revels in the anecdotal (Italo Svevo…

John Gruen, a Jewish refugee from Europe and former G.I., came to New York in 1949 looking for a way to achieve “some sort of stardom.” This entertaining memoir, strewn with exclamation points, recounts his search, as he flings himself at famous and influential people to further…

Facing a midlife crisis of sorts, Hogan, a “recovering art historian,” took a three-week trek in search of the American Sublime. Her destinations were “monuments of American land art,” including Robert Smithson’s “Spiral Jetty,” a coil of earth and rock built in the…

This book’s essays on twenty Balanchine ballets are based on pre-performance lectures. That’s bad—the essays are too short—and it’s good, because, for the lay reader, they are perfect Friday-night previews of a Saturday matinée. But this is armchair reading, too. With …

USA has distinguished itself in recent years as the oddball network—home of the misfits and safe haven for the dysfunctional. And that’s not just the viewers. The network’s slogan is “Characters welcome,” as in “That guy’s a real character.” The best illustration …

Woody Allen’s “Vicky Cristina Barcelona” has a natural, flowing vitality to it, a sun-drenched splendor that never falters. Two young American women go to Barcelona for the summer—Vicky (Rebecca Hall), who is bright, skeptical, and cautious, and Cristina (Scarlett Johansson…

The Talk of the Town

Late last month, Senator John McCain went up with a new television ad, titled “Pump.” The ad begins no place in particular with a gasoline pump, circa 1965. “Gas prices—four dollars, five dollars,” a female narrator intones, as the numbers on the pump’s front panel spin…

Go-betweens can attract as much attention as the factions they seek to reconcile: see Squanto (Pilgrims and Indians), Jimmy Carter (Egypt and Israel), Tookie Williams (Bloods and Crips), and the producers of the newly revived “Beverly Hills, 90210” (Jennie Garth and Shannen Doherty…

Several weeks ago, John McCain revealed his love for Abba, a confession that produced a campaign theme song (“Take a Chance on Me”) and a number of parodies (one, on the Web site Jezebel, went “Gimme gimme gimme McCain after midnight”). The choice of Abba—brilliant or terrible…

James Rado has been spending a lot of time in Central Park lately, discovering that certain trees and the smell of hot dogs can be as evocative as an acid flashback. In 1967, Rado and his friend Gerome Ragni, both actors, wrote a musical, with the composer Galt MacDermot, about the…

In the second decade of the twentieth century, it was almost impossible to build an airplane in the United States. That was the result of a chaotic legal battle among the dozens of companies—including one owned by Orville Wright—that held patents on the various components that…

Goings On About Town

The dance form known as stepping was invented by fraternities at black colleges around the nineteen-twenties. The students did these drills, presumably as a show of both power and togetherness, at initiation ceremonies. Eventually, stepping moved into the quad, where the houses started…

ROCK AND POP Musicians and night-club proprietors live complicated lives; it’s advisable to call ahead to confirm engagements. ALL POINTS WEST MUSIC & ARTS FESTIVAL Liberty State Park, N.J. (212-307-7171)—This new gathering attempts to bring a Coachella-like vibe to the…

At a time when museums, galleries, and collectors’ homes are full of massive color prints by Andreas Gursky, Cindy Sherman, and Thomas Ruff, the idea that color photographs were once not just unfashionable but unsalable seems impossibly quaint. “When Color Was New,” a smart…

MONICA BILL BARNES In “Game Face,” Barnes and seven collaborators take on the business world, in a work commissioned by the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s “Sitelines.” (Robert Wagner, Jr., Park, just north of Battery Park. 212-219-9401. Aug. 5-7 and Aug. 11-14 at noon…

CONCERTS IN TOWN MOSTLY MOZART FESTIVAL The next two weeks bring a bounty of musical riches, both foreign and domestic. Here are some highlights: Aug. 6 at 10:30: Jeremy Denk—one of the most versatile and admired pianists in the city—performs Schubert’s Sonata in B-Flat Major…

OPENING ANITA O’DAY: THE LIFE OF A JAZZ SINGER A documentary about the singer, directed by Robbie Cavolina and Ian McCrudden. Opening Aug. 15. (Cinema Village.) BEAUTIFUL LOSERS Aaron Rose and Joshua Leonard directed this documentary, about the intersection of such nineteen-nineties…

If Anita O’Day didn’t invent the role of the hip white chick, she certainly held the patent on it. All you have to do is watch Bert Stern’s strange, almost hallucinatory 1958 documentary, “Jazz on a Summer’s Day,” to get a fairly good idea of O’Day’s particular talents…

It’s easy to walk straight past this unassuming Thai eatery, which is set deep in the heart of the N.Y.U.-occupied Village and shares a commercial strip with a liquor store, a mailing center, and a Citibank. The co-owner, Andy Yang, and his partner’s family also own the Malaysian…

ALVIN AILEY AMERICAN DANCE THEATRE The dance troupe celebrates its fiftieth anniversary with a series of free performances and classes in all five boroughs, including an all-day street party on Aug. 9 outside its home at City Center, on Fifty-fifth Street, in Manhattan. (For more…

CLASSICAL MUSIC LATE ROMANTIC Aug. 29-31 The big-shot summer festivals have run their course by Labor Day. But Woodstock’s Maverick Concerts series offers a rich weekend of events that includes a piano recital devoted to music by Schubert and David Del Tredici and a chamber-orchestra…

“BRINGING DOWN THE GREAT FIREWALL OF CHINA” According to the PEN American Center, more than forty writers and journalists are currently in prison in China. In advance of the summer Olympics in Beijing, the center has arranged for Edward Albee, Russell Banks, Jessica Hagedorn, …

Poems

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